Built-in modules review

[Andy Whitcroft]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:51:58AM -0400, Chase Douglas wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:08 AM, Andy Whitcroft <apw at canonical.com> wrote:
> > ATA Drivers: we have the majority of the PATA and SATA drivers built in.
> > We already have reported issues with the PATA drivers where blacklisting
> > could be used as a work around if they were not built in.  We are also
> > exposing users to some level of risk including all these drivers which
> > are not used.  In testing on the reference platform I did see a minor
> > but measurable performance hit to modularising the SATA driver there.
> > As we are moving to SATA over time I would propose we pull out all of
> > the PATA drivers and build in only the 2 or 3 most common SATA drivers.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand the reasoning for including some, but not
> all, of the SATA drivers. If the drivers are mature, and we don't have
> or foresee any issues with particular drivers, then why modularize
> them? The main reason I see for modularization is if there's active
> and useful development versions that people need to fix individual
> issues and/or add features. I can see that being the case for
> something like HID drivers, but most, if not all, SATA drivers should
> be mature in both stability and features at this point, right?

I think that the logical extension to that position is that we should
build in everything which is old and stable?  All the drivers which are
built-in get at least initialised which may not be beneficial.  Also they
increase the size of the kernel itself.  There is a trade off to be had
between those we use often and therefore can benefit from being built-in
against those which would only load on one machine in 1000.  IMO.

-apw